On the heels of news that Microsoft's "Mango" update for Windows Phone 7 has been released to manufacturing, industry sources claim HTC, Samsung and LG will launch the first Mango-based smartphones in September, presumably coordinated to directly compete with Apple's next-generation iPhone.

Sources told Taiwanese industry publication DigiTimes that handset vendors plan to launch their new Mango devices in September, even as Apple is expected to release the iPhone 5 during the same timeframe. For its part, the Redmond, Wash., software giant announced earlier this week that it had sent Mango to handset and carrier partners on schedule for a fall release.

Acer, ZTE And Fujitsu Toshiba have also recently shown off Mango phones that are expected to arrive this fall. For instance, the report notes that Fujitsu Toshiba is working with Japanese carrier KDDI to bring to market the IS12T, which features a "Qualcomm MSM 8655 processor, 3.7-inch touch screen and 13.2-megapixel camera."

Insiders noted that HTC is expected to release "a number of Mango phones, powered by Qualcomm 1.5GHz single-core CPUs with display sizes ranging from 3.8- to 4.7-inch."

Meanwhile, Nokia, arguably the vendor most committed to Windows Phone 7, will reportedly unveil its first batch of Mango devices at Nokia World 2011 in October. According to the report, sources implied that the Finnish handset maker's strategy may be to release its first Windows Phone 7 handsets "at a time when fellow vendors have already heated up the market for Mango phones."

Nokia CEO Stephen Elop said last month that he has "increased confidence" that the company will launch its first Windows-based device later this year and begin to ship in volume next year. 2011 and 2012 are to be "transition years" for the company, which for years reigned the global smartphone market until Apple's iPhone displaced it last quarter.

Microsoft first showed off Mango in May, touting "more than 500 new features."

Notable additions to Windows Phone 7 Mango include Conversation View for emails and threaded conversations that bring together text, instant message and Facebook chat all into one conversation. The update will also introduce app multitasking and Internet Explorer 9, with support for new HTML 5 web sites.

Though recent data from Nielsen shows Microsoft has held onto just a 9 percent share of the U.S. smartphone operating system market, the Windows maker is betting that its stable of partners will provide the momentum needed to challenge the iPhone and Android when Mango arrives this fall.

Several recent rumors have pegged the iPhone 5 for a September launch. On Wednesday, the China Times claimed that suppliers have said Apple will release a next-generation iPhone during the second week of September. Also, AT&T is reportedly preparing for a mid-Sept. launch.

The new handset is said to be thinner and lighter, with the A5 processor and an 8-megapixel camera. Recently discovered photos also suggest that Apple is working on a cheaper, lighter and faster revision of the iPhone 4 that could become the company's entry-level model alongside the fifth-generation iPhone.

Though recent data from Nielsen shows Microsoft has held onto just a 9 percent share of the U.S. smartphone operating system market, the Windows maker is betting that its stable of partners will provide the momentum needed to challenge the iPhone and Android when Mango arrives this fall.

Microsoft can polish the turd known as Windows Mobile/Windows Phone/whatever they call it this week, and it is still a turd. Horrible UI, no apps, no ecosystem, terrible Zune service, forced integration with the terrible BING search, etc....

Microsoft should just stuck to what they know...how to maintain their illegally obtained Windows and Office monopolies and stop pissing away shareholders money on money sinks.

More likely coordinated to be availible as a present for the holidays, and coordinated to when that actually finished writing it. After all it was announced in January a long time before there was anything certain about iPhone 5.

Obvioulsy most people on here prefer iPhones, this is an Apple site after all. But what do you think of WP7 compared to Android?

Personally when I was looking at Android phones the other week, most of them looked a bit rubbish but as most of them were also very cheap I kind of understand why there selling so well.

Not for nothing, but MS didn't write the BIOS on your PC's motherboard.

I though MS / Bill Gates wrote MS-DOS - the Operating System of the first Intel based PCs - that is not the same as BIOS - sure they had to have BIOS and it was the reverse engineering of the BIOS that allowed the PC clone market to erupt all over the technology landscape wreaking the havoc that has reigned through the land since.

Not quite sure about in the beginning - but nowadays I think American Megatrends and Phoenix Software Associates have an awful lot of THAT market tied up.

I don't think even your master is gonna pull this one off (see his info) i.e., pull MS butt from the fiery hell of the phone wars. As far you signature line, that makes you sound like a basher. If you have some reasonable comments to make or share about what you think is cool about mango go for it, if not your just here as a heckler.

Interestingly we know that this is not the case, because Microsoft have told us. For a while now they've been talking about the consumerization of IT and specifically smartphones. Even Redmond is saying that people want nice consumer smartphones that integrate enterprise functionality, rather than clunky enterprise smartphones that they have to carry around in addition to their main phone.

Come on guys...a little competition is good. I personally own an Android and an iPhone 4. I like them both in their own ways. As a MS developer by day, I think it's great that I could leverage my C# skills to quickly port existing code over to WP7. I'd imagine there's great value in this for the enterprise. I'm not sure where the dev platform is at now for WP7 but when it was demoed to me last fall, it was a POS. It didn't even have any sort of SQL support. I hoped that has changed now. And it was up to the dev to emulate multitasking through a concept called 'tombstoning'. YIKES!

However one of the WPx problems that is bugging me at the moment is how long Microsoft's development cycle is.

The huge number of improvements included in a 12 month major release cycle make for good news stories, but it's not very friendly to consumers.

It's not a great feeling when you think about buying a brand new 'Mango' phone for Christmas 2011, and then not having the next major release with cool new stuff to play with until Christmas 2012.

Things like Skype integration (messaging, chat, VOIP, video), consolidation of various cloud (Live Mesh/Skydrive) and media (Zune, Xbox Live) properties, deeper integration with Xbox Live (chat/video etc)... these are things we won't see from Microsoft until the end of 2012 if they stick with the 12 month release cycles.

Obvioulsy most people on here prefer iPhones, this is an Apple site after all. But what do you think of WP7 compared to Android?

Personally when I was looking at Android phones the other week, most of them looked a bit rubbish but as most of them were also very cheap I kind of understand why there selling so well.

I think the hardware will be very similar (I think WP7 has three buttons whilst Android phones have four) so if you think the Android phones look a bit rubbish then you'll probably think the same about WP7 phones.

I though MS / Bill Gates wrote MS-DOS - the Operating System of the first Intel based PCs - that is not the same as BIOS - sure they had to have BIOS and it was the reverse engineering of the BIOS that allowed the PC clone market to erupt all over the technology landscape wreaking the havoc that has reigned through the land since.

Not quite sure about in the beginning - but nowadays I think American Megatrends and Phoenix Software Associates have an awful lot of THAT market tied up.

Bill Gates didn't write MS-DOS. He bought what became MS-DOS, QDOS from Tim Paterson, which was in fact a re-write/update of Gary Killdall's CP/M. Paterson went to work for Microsoft a couple of years later.

If you are going to insist on being an ass, at least demonstrate the intelligence to be a smart one

...reclaiming marketshare lost to Android, second priority is going after RIM and Apple. However, if RIM doesn't restore their leadership in the market, it may only be Apple that Microsoft focusses on. M/soft would like to see fewer of the BES in corporate data center between handhelds and their Exchange servers, so RIM may remain targeted for some time in spite of declining share.

If you are going to insist on being an ass, at least demonstrate the intelligence to be a smart one

Talking from a visceral level, WP7 is visually asymmetric (and specifically along the vertical axis), and we do not like asymmetry. There's just something inherently ugly about how the phone UI is laid out. The information design of the WP7 is information scarce. The home screen has something like 8 tiles, with many of them of mono-color with basically a number indicating the number of new things for the service associated with the tile.

The animation performance of WP7 appears very good, iOS good, so the guts of it appear well designed. But I think the UI design is uninspiring and makes it hard to advertise the product well.

So, I don't think consumers will voluntarily flock to WP7. There maybe a lot of handsets out there through the machinations of carriers and the OEMs, but I don't it will ever take off until MS redesigns the UI.